Top 5 Features of VMware vSphere 5.5

The release of VMware’s vSphere 5.5 is finally here! With that in mind, I put together a list of the five top vSphere 5.5 features that I’m most looking forward to.

5 Great vSphere 5.5 Features

1. VMware SSO updates– Lets just say that Single Sign On (SSO) was a big of a challenge in vSphere 5.1. This caused some customers a few sleepless nights and scared others off from upgrading to 5.1. Well the good news is VMware has rearchitected SSO in vSphere 5.5 and it does not suck anymore. Check out this other post I wrote on SSO in vSphere 5.5.

2. Support for 62TB VMDK– This feature is not required by a majority of VMware customers, but those who need it have been asking loudly for it for a while now. The good news is that you will not be able to create a 62TB VMDK now. So no more need to look at an RDM, create extents at the OS level for multiple smaller disks, or consider using in guest iSCSI. Those were some of the leading options in past for use cases that required these large disks.

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3. VM latency sensitivity– Much like the large disks, many customers won’t make use of the new low latency features right away. But as more of the remaining difficult-to-virtualize applications continue to fall and be run on VMware, this feature is sure to help. You will now have the option to set on the per VM level the option for workloads that need this level of low latency. Then vSphere will make adjustments to try and offer lower latency to the VM by reserving memory, dedicating CPU cores and possibly disabling some network features known to increase latency.

4. Expanded vGPU support– For those EUC geeks out there like myself, the good news is that VMware has expanded the list of GPUs supported for hardware accelerate 3D graphics. The expanded support brings in AMD GPUs. This will give additional options for those customers that require these advanced 3D graphics and possibly lower the cost of providing such services.

5. Improving vSphere Web Client– As VMware is slowly forcing everyone towards the web client, users are slowly adopting it. Any new feature development is only being supported in the web client so each vSphere releases will continue to limit the use of the traditional c# VMware client. The good news is that the performance of the web client is starting to improve. Even better news is that the web client now supports Mac OS X, so Apple users will now be able to access VM consoles and deploy OVFs.

Disagree? Do you prefer other vSphere 5.5 features? Drop us a note in the comments and let us know!